Hi there!

As you may have already seen, the user/organization administration in Liferay 5.2 has been completely redesigned.

The new interface is, in my opinion, clearer, nicer and much more usable, and this has been possible because of the people in the community (thank you guys for all the suggestions, complaints and feedback) and people working for Liferay, especially Jorge Ferrer, Ray Augé and Nate Cavanaugh.

In this post, I just wanted to higlight some of the new features/improvements and explain the reasons for all these changes.

• The design. It's soooo nice, isn't it? This is an artwork by Nate (this guy is a genius).
  
• Modify everywhere, save in one place. As you can see, there can be a lot of sections in the user administration. You can move from one to another making changes in any of them and when you click on the Save Button everything will be saved.
  
• Know what you are changing. Evertime you modify a section, you will see it has been modified in the menu.
  
• All together with a unified UI. You will find a section for everything related to organizations, other for communities, other for user groups... and one for roles (regular roles, community roles and organization roles) yes, all together, so that you can see everything at first glance.
  
• Better error management. If you save all your changes and you get an error, no one of your changes will have been saved in the server, however, you will still have all your changes in your sections (you can see they keep the modified sign). In addition, the sections with errors will show an error icon in the menu and an error message just over the field which was wrong.
  
• Adding more fields dinamycally. You can add as many phone, emails... without loading the page. (This is algo a great work by Nate)
  
• The toolbar. This small toolbar really makes you work faster... you'll see...
  
• Custtom attributes. As you may have read in Ray's blog (Ray is an amazing guy too), you can define custom attributes without writing a line of code which will be shown in the custom attributes section. (more information in this wiki article: Custom attributes)
  
• Extension and configuration easier than ever. 2 groups of properties in portal.properties define all the sections you will see when creating users and when adding users... completely customizable, easy, right? and you can even add your own sections here! All you have to do to display your new section is add its name to the appropiate property and place a jsp file with the same name (changing hyphons for underscores) in the folder enterprise_admin/user/ In this folder you will find a jsp file for every section, so it can't be easier to modify, so, you can even place custom attributes (using the taglib) in the section you prefere. (more information about this can be found in this wiki article: User Administration)
  

All the things said before are the same for organizations. You will aso find 2 groups of porperties and you will be able to add your jsp files for new sections in enterprise_admin/organization folder. (more information in this wiki article: Organization administration). From the organization administration you can even change the logo which will be displayed in all the pages of your organization.

I hope you enjoy all these new features, and please, feel free to tell us what you think, we are completely open to new ideas, feedback and suggestions!